The Nintendo Switch revolutionised on-the-go gaming – can the PlayStation Portal do the same?

The Guardian

05-03-2025

Happy Monster Hunter Wilds week to all who celebrate: Capcom's thrilling action game has sold 8m units in three days, which means that quite a lot of you are likely to be playing it. I'm a huge fan of this series and am delighted by the latest entry, but after filing the review last week, I've barely had a minute to play it since it came out. Regular readers will know that this is a familiar problem for me: I have two kids, so my gaming time is tight, and the living room TV is very often in use.
I anticipated this, so in the run-up to Monster Hunter Wilds' release, I spent £200 on a PlayStation Portal – essentially a screen sandwiched between two halves of a PlayStation 5 controller. I can't decide whether it's one of the most unwieldy things that Sony has ever come out with, or one of the most elegant. It lets me stream games from my PS5, so the console can be whirring away under the TV and I can be on the sofa with my little screen, swinging a transforming axe at a dreadful octopus.
Here's how the Portal works: you turn it on, and it makes pleasing futuristic noises. A circular portal appears, pulsing soothingly, as it tries to connect to your home console. Then, if it works (sometimes it took a few attempts for me), your PlayStation 5 homepage appears through that portal, and expands to fill the whole of the screen in your hands. Then you can play everything just as you would on your TV, with controller rumble and haptic feedback and everything. When the internet connection falters, the device downgrades the game's appearance rather than booting you out; it'll let the game become a soup of pixels and weird messy visual artefacts rather than forcing you to reconnect.
I have played with a whole bunch of game-streaming 'solutions' over the years (the first was Gaikai, way back in 2009, which offered games like World of Warcraft streamed from the cloud, still very novel at the time), and they have always been, well, suboptimal. No matter how good your internet connection was, there was always just that bit too much lag. Streamed games always looked noticeably worse. Wifi was never quite reliable enough. But the Portal works stunningly well on my home wifi. Monster Hunter looks perfect. It's a demanding action game, so any lag quickly makes it feel unplayable, yet I have been able to play it on the Portal for many hours without feeling too frustrated.
You can also use the Portal to play PS5 games away from home, using the device to turn your console on remotely in your empty house (tip: yank the HDMI cable out the back before you leave so it won't turn your TV on). I took the Portal on a wee half-term holiday with my family – certainly more convenient than packing up an entire console and all its gubbins – and had a go at connecting to my home PlayStation 5 from my hotel room. It took a few tries, but it did work even on hotel wifi, which I found near-miraculous. Unfortunately, under these circumstances, the streaming quality was sometimes so bad that the game looked worse than it did 15 years ago on the PSP, and the lag was unbearable. It was not the on-the-go PlayStation gaming experience I was hoping for.
The Portal is a useful little gadget – at home, when it works. And that is the case with any kind of internet-reliant game streaming: it's good when it works. One day I would love to be able to play my games wherever I am, without sacrificing the quality of the experience, but streaming technology hasn't gotten there yet and I'm starting to wonder if it ever will. It's certainly gotten better: I've streamed games from the Xbox's Game Pass library on my home console with only the occasional problem. But what I really want is to be able to stream games to a handheld when I'm in my office or travelling.
The Nintendo Switch was released eight years ago, and it remains the gold standard of at home/on-the-go hybrid gaming – because it doesn't rely on an internet connection. It just works, seamlessly: you pick it up and take it with you, put it in the dock and it instantly appears on the TV. The Switch changed my life, by letting me fit my game time around my job, friends, travel and family. The Steam Deck has also been transformative, letting me take a game I'm reviewing (or enjoying) from my office to my house, or play it on a long-haul flight. We're used to this now, after almost a decade, but it was truly one of the most revolutionary technical things any console has achieved.
It's only a few weeks until the big Nintendo Switch 2 event on 2 April, when we'll learn more about what this next console can actually do. Given that this is Nintendo, I'd be surprised if internet-based game streaming was a part of the new console's offering; Nintendo tends to favour older, proven technology over risky bets. Eight years is a long time for Nintendo's competitors to have perfected an alternative untethered gaming solution, and nobody has yet done it. Perhaps it's just not possible; no wonder the Switch 2 is sticking to what works.
From the makers of co-op divorce platformer It Takes Two – which unexpectedly, sold 23m copies, a figure that publishers would do well to remember in this age of safe bets – Split Fiction is an ambitious and gently silly game about two authors who are forced to inhabit each other's stories. Sci-fi writer Mio and fantasy writer Zoe turn up at a meeting at a big publishing house, only for its sinister CEO to imprison them in a futuristic idea-stealing machine.
You need two players for this game, as it's entirely dependent on working together for both the puzzley and actiony bits. (Don't worry if there's a skill differential between you and your prospective co-op partner – one player can do most of the heavy lifting if required.) It's full of ideas, this, and wonderfully designed around co-operative play, whether you're playing with a friend, a partner or an older child.
Available on: PC, Xbox, PlayStation 5
Estimated playtime: 15 hours
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater is back, again. The third and fourth entries in the series are being remastered by Activision, and will be out in the summer.
Activision ran a bunch of horrible AI-art ads on Instagram last weekend for games that don't actually exist. The ads link to surveys presumably intended to gauge interest in the fake games, but instead all everyone's talking about is why the band in Guitar Hero Mobile has four guitarists, no singer and a phantom drummer.
Rockstar has bought an Australian studio run by Brendan McNamara, the director of the 2011 detective drama game LA Noire, which was also published by Rockstar. His previous studio, Team Bondi, closed down shortly after LA Noire ended its protracted development, after former employees called out an allegedly toxic, oppressive, crunch-heavy work culture led by McNamara.
Games industry analyst Mat Piscatella ran the numbers and found that 40% of all the time spent gaming in the US in January was spent playing the same 10 live service games, most of which are years old. It paints a bleak picture for any developer trying to break into this space.
Sign up to Pushing Buttons
Keza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gaming
after newsletter promotion
When video game age ratings go wrong
Typewriters, stinky carpets and crazy press trips: what it was like working on video game mags in the 1980s
Ghost hunting, pornography and interactive art: the weird afterlife of Xbox Kinect
James Bond by Amazon wouldn't be a bad thing – if we finally got a true successor to GoldenEye 007 | Dominik Diamond
Monster Hunter Wilds – prepare for the most epic fight of your life | ★★★★★
The 15 best games to play on the Nintendo Switch in 2025
I got something wrong in last week's Question Block answer: Doug wrote in to say that the Nintendo Switch does now have a YouTube app, though happily he says the parental controls are good enough to stop his 11- and 8-year-old kids from constantly redownloading it.
As for this week's question, it comes courtesy of reader Emily:
'What games did you previously love that you wouldn't enjoy playing today?'
I really had to think about this one. I'm sure we can all immediately think of a TV show we enjoyed as teenagers that we find deeply embarrassing now (*cough* Family Guy *cough*) – but we tend to make excuses for the games we adored when we were young, even if our tastes have changed massively since then. I would have talked your ear off about how great Shenmue was as a teenager, because everything it did was new at the time. Now, even if you ignore the technological advances that have made realistic-looking game worlds standards, the sheer cringeworthy thinness of the plot and characters make it harder to love. I adored a lot of JRPGs, from Skies of Arcadia to Dragon Quest, that I simply wouldn't be able to enjoy now due to their slow pace (and the interminable repetitive random battles).
Also, in the 00s we all gave a lot of games a pass for being technically interesting or ambitious, when they were also juvenile and/or sexist. I'm thinking especially of 2005's Indigo Prophecy here (Fahrenheit in the US), a game that was certainly interesting but also rife with racial and gender stereotyping that made me want to cringe myself inside out when I replayed it a few years later. I remember defending an obscure Japanese horror-ish game that put all the female characters into a strip-club room as a reward for finishing the game, because it was otherwise novel. These days, with the benefit of age and experience, my tolerance for casual sexism is basically zero – and quite a few games in my PS2-era collection would now be more difficult to enjoy.
If you've got a question for Question Block email us on [e-mail]